OUR PROJECTS

Our education, health, and economic opportunity programs are delivered to over 30,000 women and children in India and Cambodia.

Education

Anti Trafficking & VAW

Economic Empowerment

Health & Sanitation

Nearly all of Lotus Outreach’s initiatives in Asia work to expand access to education, with a particular focus on women and girls. From literacy classes for sex workers up to university scholarships, to directly supporting teachers or exposing corrupt education officials, our education work is transforming not only our target communities, but the fates of countless generations to come.

Trafficking is inextricably linked to poverty in the developing world; for that reason, Lotus Outreach considers all of its programs to be preventative in nature. Our work to reduce violence against women (VAW) focuses on preventing abuse and exploitation before they occur. For those who are survivors of violence, we have programs that provide trauma therapy, social services and economic empowerment.

We invest heavily in initiatives that improve earning potential and livelihood for individuals, families and communities. Through the provision of skills training, small business grants, and the establishment of community-led savings and loan groups we ensure communities can ultimately meet their own needs, such as food, healthcare and education, without continued dependence on development and relief organizations.

Lack of access to clean water and adequate sanitation facilities - along with poor hygiene - are among the leading causes of childhood death in the developing world. Many health problems such as typhoid, dysentery and malaria are easily preventable and treatable. Lotus Outreach's approach is to spread knowledge on preventative healthcare practices - from hand-washing to reproductive health - as well as build deep bore wells in drought prone regions.

OUR APPROACH

Believing that change spreads fastest from the ground up, Lotus Outreach projects are delivered at the grassroots level by local people and organisations.

We provide critical support to our local partners in the following areas:

 Funding

 Program Design

 Performance Management

Training

OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Multi-Dimensional Problems Demand Multi-Dimensional Solutions

Diverse Communities = Diverse Approaches

Successful programs embrace the complex nature of the development process, and introduce holistic solutions where possible. For example, our micro finance programs incorporate advocacy on education, sanitation, and human trafficking prevention and our scholarship programs recognize that malnutrition and sickness can interfere with schooling and thus provide food stipends and healthcare. A problem as complicated and complex as poverty demands a similarly complex, thoughtful, and well-planned solution.

Through our nearly 20 years of experience, we have learned that cultural nuance must be a core element of program design. We recognize that values, priorities, and capabilities not only change from one country to another, but also from one village to another. Perhaps, more importantly, we recognize that opportunities vary greatly from one community to the next. Whether our target beneficiary is landed or landless, urban or rural, or young or old will determine the type of services we provide them.

Investing Wisely

Maximize Existing Resources

Charitable funds are finite - particularly for international organizations - and we owe it to our donors and our target communities to expand our resources carefully and smartly. We believe that investing wisely means supporting projects that will a) achieve sustainable results for entire communities or b) capitalize on the "multiplier effect" by investing in those who promise to pay forward the skills and knowledge they receive.

We believe that we can get a lot more mileage from our investment if we augment what already exists. In the case of our core education programs, for example, this means supplementing (v. replicating) the government education system through transportation programs, scholarships, and tutoring. Unlike some of our counterparts in the charitable sector, we don't build private schools or fund private scholarships. We must invest in improving the government system rather than turning our backs on it.